You're right, there's about 90k NEWLINE nodes on the heap, and at 40 bytes a piece that's taking up about 3.6mb of slots on the heap that could be used by other

You're right, there's about 90k NEWLINE nodes on the heap, and at 40 bytes a piece that's taking up about 3.6mb of slots on the heap that could be used by other ruby objects instead. Unfortunately, removing newlines from your codebase will not help since NODE_NEWLINE is used for separators like semicolons as well. Ruby 1.9 gets rid of NODE_NEWLINE altogether by adding a NEWLINE flag to the next node instead. A similar patch will be in the next release of REE.